


Set and Match

by kalliel



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Aftermath, Episode Tag, Episode: s14e17 Game Night, Gen, Grotesque Imagery, POV Sam Winchester, Sam's thoughts about Mary, Season/Series 14, crime scene cleanup, denouement, flashfic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-08
Updated: 2019-04-08
Packaged: 2020-01-06 22:33:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 993
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18397703
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kalliel/pseuds/kalliel
Summary: The problem with calling that ambulance: Now you need to dispose of the bodies. You have fifteen minutes.14x17 "Game Night" cutting room floor tag.





	Set and Match

It's not like Dean's gotten weirder, over the years. Sure, Mary's been worrying over him for weeks, in the exact same way Sam's certain she's been worrying about him, except when Dean is in earshot. She's using them both, trading them off. Her worry is real, but she's using it go get closer to both of them, and Sam knows it. It's separate and tactical but still loving, somehow. It's all very weird. But Dean's too tired to care anymore and Sam can't crack the puzzle alone, can't decide if it's fair to call it a puzzle. Maybe you're allowed your weirdness when you're raised from the dead by the Darkness and the multiverse is involved.

Dean, meanwhile has slipped through the cracks of some other iteration of the multiverse, still plunging downward, at the deeply cellular level, toward the certainty that Sam is gone Sam is dead he is alone. That's Dean's weirdness. Even through Jack fixed everything and everything, as Jack says, is fine.

It doesn't feel fine, all the blood in Sam's body rushing toward an injury that no longer exists, but he banks on the notion that he is, and tries to stand.

"Drink something." 

It's Dean, arm outstretched, offering up a mangled plastic water bottle, cap dirty and dented and label long gone. Sam has no idea where it came from. Dean still can't look at him.

"Let's go get Mom," he says. Gets in the driver's seat.

Doesn't matter. Sam has the keys, from the babysitting Lucifer thing, and they have no idea where Mary is, from the Jack-is-a-Nephilim thing, because, "Dean. Jack-- We don't know where they are, remember? Where they-- Or how to drive there."

Dean takes a deep breath. Hands to face--nope, doesn't do it. Brow to steering wheel. Another breath. Turns a circle in the dirt because he's about to get out and look at Sam, but doesn't.

"Fuck, the bodies," he says. "We need to--"

Sam can feel Dean happening faster, finally. Coming out of his personal Empty and back to the reality where Sam is alive because Jack is a Nephilim, and no power on Earth can stop him. Dean hasn't gotten weirder; he just stays there longer. He's been surviving all this time on selective elimination, but none of this, now, can be eliminated.

"There's gonna be a fucking ambulance here in fifteen minutes. Probably cops."

Sam hands the water bottle back to Dean, who doesn't drink any. The water disappears into the trunk and rope appears and Dean slips in the snow heading down to the warehouse again--he looks up, looks down, tries to decide if there's enough coming down that'll hide their footsteps, his footsteps, down and up and down again--and Sam thinks, Nick.

He hadn't been babysitting Lucifer. It had been Nick.

Just Nick.

But none of this, now, can be eliminated.

 

\--

 

Down at the warehouse, Dean is strapping bodies together. Two is too many to carry--not in ten minutes. So they are going to drag them up the hill in bulk. It's grotesque--or it would be, but Dean's not thinking about that. Dean's thinking about they have ten minutes. Sam's thinking about the way they hadn't done this with the twenty-seven bodies in the bunker four weeks ago. The way they had been gentle with those. How wrong it had felt, because you shouldn't get to be gentle when it's already too late. Michael hadn't been gentle.

They drag the bodies up the hill. A couple hundred pounds of dead weight through the powder snow and the brambles and the clay dirt, and somehow this feels more right.

Dean is absolutely fucking it up, though. Like he's never scaled a hillside with some dead bodies before. He can't put his feet in the right places, can't get his grip. He's making a slush-mess of the route. Sam would chalk it up to Dean still slogging through the (thwarted) reality where Sam is one of the bodies in the rope, but Sam happens to know Dean has had ample opportunity to be painfully professional with Sam's dead body. He can do it. Or he could.

"Dean," Sam says finally, because they're past time and only halfway up. Sam catches a flash of red in his peripheral vision every so often--so far it's just been his own blood in his head but eventually it won't be, it'll be that fucking ambulance. Dean just waves him forward.

"We can stash-- in the snow, until--" 

Dean shakes his head. 

Sam adds, "Then Jack--" but Dean shakes his head again. So Sam heaves the bodies up. He drags. Dean is probably helping, somehow, but his aid difficult to pinpoint. Mostly, Sam forgets about Dean, until it is just him and the bodies and the hill.

At the top, Donatello is drinking that twisted water bottle. Sam had forgotten about him, too. Jack and Mary are nowhere to be found.

"Hope they found their own way, then," Dean pants. "Taxi's full." 

They fit the bald one in the trunk. The other slumps upright in the backseat.

Sam doesn't have a damn clue where he'd left the other car. That fact is gone, along with the pain. Along with the death. He's not sure what else is missing.

Donatello climbs into the backseat with the corpse and cracks a window, muttering something about smell and temperature. He buttons the demon's coat over its wound and straightens its collar. 

"You kids all set back there?" Dean asks. Sam hands him the keys.

"Aren't we going to wait for Jack?" Sam asks. 

"No. I don't know. I--"

"Otherwise, how's he gonna--"

"I don't know."

Key, ignition. Rumble.

"He's omnipotent, isn't he?" Dean says.

I mean, I don't…" Sam pauses. "I don't think we ever established that."

"Okay, well. Perishable cargo."

Dean stays idling as an ambulance screams past. Sam watches it diminish in the rearview. 

It never slows down.

**Author's Note:**

> I just love weird, adrenaline-hazy miswired post-hunt cleanup fallout introspection and that's really my only excuse, ok.


End file.
